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Wednesday, January 15, 2014

I'm still alive

Last night was rough. I go through periods of feeling pretty great followed by some rough patches and I find that usually when I stop taking my thyroid medicine for a few days I start to feel better. It's my body telling me that I've got too much Synthroid in my system and it's a huge balancing act of trying to blindly regulate my levels.

I've been having pretty extreme leg pain this week and last night it escalated beyond my exhausting leg pain and materialized into whole-body numbness. It's hard to explain. My face, arms, legs, and down one side of my back felt as if they were coated in Icy Hot or Ben Gay, this unexplainable numbing burning sensation. I tossed around under the covers thinking that maybe I was lying on a nerve and it was causing those symptoms. I thought maybe I was dehydrated or low on calcium. After two hours of being awake and petrified that I couldn't feel my body, or rather I could feel it but it was burning and sore, I crawled downstairs and wrote about how I was feeling on Facebook. I was terrified. And a part of me wanted to write it down on Facebook so that if I had died during the night people would know why. That sounds extremely dramatic but it was such a scary pain that I envisioned that maybe I had a blood clot in my legs or I was going into hypocalcemic shock and my heart would give out and I would pass in my sleep. I remember looking at a picture of Kate as I fell in and out of consciousness and wondering if she would remember me if I didn't make it through the night. I was ready to wake Sean up to take me to the hospital. But then I thought, none of my endocrinologists can help me without changing my Synthroid dose and telling me to wait a few weeks to see if I feel better so how would a hospital be able to fix me? So I drank some water in case I was simply dehydrated and fell back to sleep around 3AM.

I woke this morning feeling numb in my arms and legs but no longer in my back and face. An improvement. When I heard Kate giggling in her crib I opted to call for Sean to carry her downstairs because I didn't trust myself to bring her myself. Sean came up to check on me a few minutes later and my feet and hands were extremely clammy and I looked gray in the face. I'm not sick, this is all normal thyroid cancer stuff, but basically--as Cancer.org so nicely explains, "Extreme tiredness, called fatigue, is very common in people treated for cancer. This is not a normal tiredness, but a bone-weary exhaustion that doesn't get better with rest."--it feels like all of my bones are bending backwards. It feels like I'm recovering from running a marathon and I can never fully recoup.

So I called my hero, my Pops, and asked him if he could bring Dylan to school for me. He was here right on time and I spent three straight hours on the couch with Kate, not moving.

Pops came back with a container of homemade minestrone soup from a friend of mine at preschool dropoff and dropped Dylan off when school ended. I'm still having a hard time walking today but nothing like I felt last night and upon waking.

Since it was near 50&deg and I was starting to feel better we dressed up and played in the backyard.

I love that we bought Dylan a $229 dune racer and he was more excited to rake the yard. That's my little worker bee! Dylan has been enjoying a new reading app called Endless Reader. It's extremely addicting and very fun.

Let's see, what else is happening around here. Oh! We watched that Julia Louis-Dreyfus/James Gandolfini movie Enough Said last night and loved it. We watched the Hangover III this week, too and hated it.

Our saving money efforts are coming along nicely. We budget $400 for groceries and gas every two weeks and we always go over that because I spend frivolously at the grocery store but with the new Food On the Table app we've been using we were right on budget this month with fresh homemade meals every night. I started writing down everything I spend because I am horrible at dropping $1 here and there and then it all adds up. We have big plans for the future and not too many credit cards to pay down so I'm determined to help Sean out with building a bigger savings account. And I made $262 on EBay yesterday as an added bonus. We make a decent living but we could make a better one if I paid attention to the needless material items I buy. I also called our cellphone provider and managed to drop our bill $60 by analyzing our plan and dropping the data feature from my iPhone. So far I'm really enjoying not having internet access outside of the house, I find myself talking to the kids more, and looking up more. Sean made a comment to me this weekend about how he hasn't seen me in the car for about two years when I made an observation about some trees we drove by. That's sad. I always sit in the front seat and bury my head in my phone when we drive anywhere, it's become a bad habit and it actually is soothing in a weird therapeutic way. So I'm liking the idea that I can't do that anymore while we save $360 a year on just my data alone. This year we cut cable, paid off both of our cars, added a beautiful and tiny new tax deduction to our family, reduced our cellphone bill, refinanced our house and with all of those easy steps which really don't change our life too drastically (aside from the having a baby part), we are saving a thousand dollars a month easily. That's a nice lump of unwasted money that we can tuck away for the future. If you'd like to talk to me about the steps we've taken to cut unnecessary expenses feel free to reach out and I'd be glad to discuss it further.